Simon Hall’s second book is set in the mid-1970s during the closing years of the golden age of British shipping, when cargo carriage at sea saw radical change and the romance of being at sea in old-style cargo ships came to an end. Hall’s account is of five years during which he worked as a junior officer in the Far East and South Pacific. This is no ordinary memoir; the prose is vividly expressed, often shocking, sometimes elegiac as evidenced by his description of a night watch in the In...

This is a thought-provoking work, capturing the march of time which overtook the maritime world in the last quarter of the 20th century. The final crumbling of the British register caused officers like Hall to find themselves in a strange new world, sailing under flags of convenience with all the old certainties of life at sea having vanished. There is both sadness and a rage at seeing a way of life disappear forever under the wheels of commerce, made more poignant by the author himself sw...

Simon Hall went to sea in search of a way of life that he believed was glamorous, adventurous and disciplined, a life where smartly-uniformed men ran ships in a tightly organised manner. At this time the British fleet was still one of the largest in the world and the Red Ensign a common sight in most large ports. In over three years as a Deck Cadet he explored this world and although he uncovered much of the magic of the sea, he also encountered brutality, exploitation, dizzying hard work ...

'It was a weapon fashioned by somebody with experience and understanding of a deadly primitive craft, and the red paint on the tip could be nothing else but a simulation of the blood of the intended victim. The masked doll and the weapon, the two together…and the blood-red sky fading above me. I felt suddenly cold and appalled'.When Perenna Holland, descendant of a once powerful shipping family, is forced to sell her home on the English seacoast, the inventory turns up in an album ...

This is a story told through the eyes of a young sailor who joined the Royal Navy in 1955 as a Boy Seaman 2nd class, the absolute lowest rank in the Navy. Follow his induction at HMS Ganges, the toughest boys training establishment in England if not the world., and his first assignment to HMS Cockade in time to visit Australia for the opening of the 1956 Olympic games. One voyage not to be missed

Sailing, Yachts and Yarns is a selection of British sailing legend Tom Cunliffe's most entertaining, outspoken and instructive writing from the pages of Yachting Monthly magazine. Tom's regular column for this leading sailing magazine gives him free reign to explore a wide range of topics. He has a gift for capturing the magic of sail and finding pearls of practical wisdom in the most unlikely nautical adventures. Sailing, Yachts and Yarns is a wonderful miscellany of wit, wisdom and wonde...

Mark Dodd arrived in Broome in 1978 as a 20-year-old looking for adventure, after working his way across northern Australia. There he fell in with the crew of the fabled DMcD, one of the last of the old wooden pearling luggers that still worked the Kimberley coast diving for pearl shell. He came aboard as a deckhand before graduating to become one of the pearl shell divers. He dived for four seasons, living a life on the luggers and in the pubs and exotic alleys of Broome that would have b...

One summer, writer and musician, Jasper Winn set himself an extraordinary task. He would kayak the whole way round Ireland -- a thousand miles -- camping on remote headlands and islands, carousing in bars and paddling clockwise until he got back where he started. But in the worst Irish summer in living memory the pleasures of idling among seals, fulmars and fishing boats soon gave way to heroic struggles through storm-tossed seas ... and lock-ins playing music in coastal pubs. Circling the...

When John Lee joined the Merchant Navy he had no idea of the adventures which were to come his way over the next ten years. An innocent sixteen year old from East Yorkshire, he was first apprenticed to the toughest of trampship companies before experiencing the potentially explosive delights of life on an oil tanker.Finally, as a young officer enjoying rather more civilised surroundings, he is obliged to learn the art of polite conversation as he mixes with affluent first class passengers ...

The dramatic story of the sinking of the Dunedin StarNovember 9th, 1942. Amid the cloaking gloom of the Liverpool docks lay the Dunedin Star. A ship of the Blue Star Line, she was bound for the Middle East, her consignment of munitions for the 8th Army supplemented by twenty-one fare-paying civilians escaping the Blitz for the colonies, all forced to take the long haul round the Cape.As an unescorted merchantman sailing U-boat infested waters, Dunedin Star'...

Ian Dickens is the great, great grandson of Charles Dickens. He has started the Cresta Run 50 times, successfully completing it on 49 occasions. He learned to fly, taking up a Tiger Moth solo, raced his MG Midget to the Arctic Circle and back for charity and has tried a couple of skydives for good measure.

I was five years of age when I first fell in love with the sea, which is the subject of the first story in my book All At Sea.I was a 'natural' at it, often performing a task on a boat before being told when or how to do it. I believe this knowledge came from a previous life spent on the water, and from the genes of two grandfathers who had been seafarers, and my father who had also spent some time at sea. Even my adventures in boatbuilding came without much formal training, but ra...